Ontology-driven Question Generation for Crisis Management

descriptions. Descriptions of both types have an informational value which is mutually comparable and indicates the semantic distance from the true and most specific description of the actual situation. We developed several strategies to generate the most efficient sequence of questions to determine a situation. The choice of strategy depends on the assumptions that can be made about the domain. When situations are defined but no assumption about these situations can be made, a laborious strategy is used which subsequently asks whether a specific situation is true. Are situations or a part of a situation defined by parametric infons then we use a strategy which uses each parametric infon and asks whether one of the referents of the parameter is true. When a set of infons with unknown polarity is combined to create a series of possible situations then we use a ‘divide and conquer’ strategy. When that same assumption can be made and some of the theoretical possible situations are in practice impossible we use a strategy which prohibits impossible situations. When a situation is partially defined by a parametric infon and the set of references is defined in an ontology with is-a relations, we use a strategy which finds the most specific description. With the Situation Awareness Question Generator (SAQG) we presented an application to automatically generate questions. These questions are generated from an ontology using several algorithms based on the strategies we developed. SAQG is meant to be used on a mobile device and gather information about a crisis situation from ordinary people. This information is then sent to emergency services. Now we have the formalization and algorithms to ask the right questions at the right moment, we want to know next what kind of concepts we have to use. The next chapters will be about what the right concepts are and which strategies are optimal when SAQG is used by ordinary people for the purpose of determination of a situation. 40 CHAPTER 3. SITUATION AWARENESS QUESTION GENERATOR